Six Tragedies

Seneca Emily Wilson

Description

Here is a lively, readable, and accurate verse translation of the six best plays by one of the most influential of all classical Latin writers--the only tragic playwright from ancient Rome whose work survives. Tutor to the emperor Nero, Seneca lived through uncertain, oppressive, and violent times, and his dramas depict the extremes of human behavior. Rape, suicide, child-murder, incestuous love, madness, and mutilation afflict the characters, who are obsessed and destroyed by their feelings. Seneca forces us to think about the difference between compromise and hypocrisy, about what happens when emotions overwhelm judgment, and about how a person can be good, calm, or happy in a corrupt society and under constant threat of death. In addition to her superb translation, Emily Wilson provides an invaluable introduction which offers a succinct account of Seneca's life and times, his philosophical beliefs, the literary form of the plays, and their immense influence on European literature. The book also includes an up-to-date bibliography and explanatory notes which identify mythological allusions.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Six Tragedies

Seneca Emily Wilson

Author Information

Six Tragedies

Seneca Emily Wilson

Reviews and Awards

"This edition of Seneca's tragedies is fresh, affordable, and teachable, and I hope it will make Senecan tragedy more accessible for those wanting to teach it in courses on Latin literature, drama, or myth. Wilson has discovered a proper idiom for Seneca's tragedies, one that not only is suitable for the grandeur of his rhetorical catalogues, but can also deliver his sententiae with the cunning and thrust they deserve."-Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Six Tragedies

Seneca Emily Wilson

From Our Blog

By Emily Wilson April, says Eliot famously in the Wasteland, is the cruellest month, 'breeding / Lilacs out of the dead ground, mixing/ Memory and desire'. Spring, in this shocking reversal of common tropes, is bad for precisely the reasons we usually think it good: because it involves a rebirth of what had seemed dead. Eliot's poem, which will itself enact the rebirth or zombie resuscitation of many greatest hits of western literary culture, begins with a recognition of how horrible, and how spooky, this process is. You try to bury the dead, but they won't stay in the grave.